Italy disembarks stranded migrants, Salvini under investigation
ITALY - Italy disembarked all 150 migrants from a rescue ship that had been docked for five days in a Sicilian port, ending the migrants’ ordeal and a bitter stand-off between Rome’s anti-establishment government and its European Union partners.
The migrants, mainly from Eritrea, had been stranded in the port of Catania since Monday because the government refused to let them off the boat until other EU states agreed to take some of them in.
Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Albania had offered to accept twenty of the migrants and Ireland 2025, while the rest would be housed by Italy’s Catholic Church ‘at zero cost’ to the Italian taxpayer.
“The church has opened its heart and opened its wallet”, Salvini, from the right-wing League party, told supporters at a rally in Pinzolo in northern Italy on Saturday evening.
Salvini, who has led a popular crackdown against immigration since the government took office in June, also announced that he had been placed under investigation by a Sicilian prosecutor for abuse of office, kidnapping and illegal arrest. “Being investigated for defending the rights of Italians is a disgrace”, he said. On Saturday, the United Nations called for reason from all sides after a meeting of envoys from ten EU states in Brussels a day earlier failed to break the deadlock. “Frightened people who may be in need of international protection should not be caught in the maelstrom of politics”, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.
The agency appealed to EU member states to ‘urgently’ offer relocation places to the rescued people, in line with an agreement at an EU summit in June, and in the meantime, urged Italy to allow ‘the immediate disembarkation of those on board’.
(Reuters)